On Linkin Park's first album, Hybrid Theory, the group declared that "the journey is more important than the end or the start." The Los Angeles rap-rockers certainly had an impressive start -- Hybrid Theory was the top-selling album of 2001 with more than 8 million copies...
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On Linkin Park's first album, Hybrid Theory, the group declared that "the journey is more important than the end or the start." The Los Angeles rap-rockers certainly had an impressive start -- Hybrid Theory was the top-selling album of 2001 with more than 8 million copies sold in the United States -- but the journey is indeed ongoing.
As befits their genre, the sextet's lyricists, singer Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda, are most at home with angst and rage. Their songs are about loss, loneliness, insecurity, fear and, as time went on, the alarming state of world and particularly U.S. affairs. There's a university to these topics in their lyrics; they could be the tantrums of any car door-slamming teen or early twentysomething, a universality which seems to be exactly what Bennington and Shinoda are going for in their songs. The value-plus is a sensitivity and genuine-sounding depth of feeling to their deliveries that's unlike the machismo of many of their peers.
The lyrics of Hybrid Theory and its follow-up, 2003's Meteora, are of a piece, exploring and venting very personal kinds of turmoil. There are songs about walls closing in and wounds that will not heal ("Crawling"), "voices in the back of my head" ("Papercut"), being "about to break" ("One Step Closer") and not knowing who to trust ("From the Inside"). In "Breaking the Habit" Shinoda laments that "I took what I hated and made it part of me," while Bennington begs to "take back my life." And an undefined "you" is the demon corrupting their souls in the words to songs such as "Figure.09" and "Lying From You."
What bothers the duo broadens on 2007's Minutes to Midnight, which features dramatically less rapping than its predecessors. There's still plenty of internal maelstrom ("What the f--- is wrong with me/Put me out of my f---king misery!" Bennington pleads in his lyrics to "Given Up"), but Linkin Park has noticed there's a world out there, too, particularly on the gospel-tinged "Hands Held High" and the Bush-bashing fury of "The Little Things Give You Away," which references Iraq and Katrina in its lyrics as Bennington wails "All you've ever wanted was someone to truly look up to you/And six feet underwater, I do." The journey is just starting to get interesting...
